Sustainable Fashion for a Living World

.A look from Susan Cianciolo's Fall/Winter 2009 Collection. Photograph by Sarah Scaturro

I will be moderating a panel discussion on sustainable fashion this coming Wednesday, May 27th at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The panel features Rogan Gregory and Scott Hahn from Loomstate, Julie Gilhart from Barney's and Leslie Hoffman from EarthPledge. Issues that I'm hoping to explore with the discussants include the rise of greenwashing, the inherent tensions between eco-lux and mass sustainable fashion, the place of technology, and the role of the consumer. Please let me know if there are specific questions you might want me to ask (that is, if you can't attend the discussion yourself!) The panel discussion is held in conjunction with the Cooper-Hewitt's new exhibition called Design for a Living World, and the exhibition will be open for a private viewing an hour before the event.

Here are the details:

May 27, 2009, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY 10128
www.cooperhewitt.org

Members/Students: $10
Others: $15

Register online or by calling the education department at 212-849-8353

Sarah Scaturro

CAA 2009 Los Angeles (and fashion)

Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Spring/Summer 1997. Photo Paolo Roversi.

The recently completed College Art Association Annual Conference had a surprisingly small numbers of papers which could fall under the fashion history and theory heading. More numerous were papers revolving around the theme of craft, ornamentation and the body.

I spoke on Rei Kawakubo’s collection from Spring/Summer 1997 titled “Body Meets Dress,” and her subsequent collaboration with Merce Cunningham for a dance of the same year, Scenario. The paper was part of a panel organized by Victoria Rovine and Sarah Adams titled “Clothing, Flesh, Bone: Visual Culture above and below the Skin.” The papers presented in this stimulating panel ranged the gamut from architectural history—how German Körperkultur translated into architecture—to participatory art practice—the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica —to medical science (i.e. discussion of reconstructive plastic surgery).

Merce Cunningham, Scenario, 1997. Photo courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Archives

Unfortunately, I missed a panel organized by Alla Myzelev of the University of Western Ontario dedicated to the convergence of fashion and furniture, as well as a panel on ornament organized by Patricia Flores, which included a paper by Glenn Adamson, currently at the V&A. However, the latter’s work seems to have inspired a very interesting and lively panel on Queering Crafts, which featured mostly practioners’ presentations. Among the most interesting papers was Jesse M. Kahn’s. which introduced a range of queer practioners’ work, including his own. Among them were Bren Ahearn—who seems to be commenting both on gender and labor processes, by carefully embroidering the word “manmade” on cheaply mass-manufactured goods.

Francesca

Symposium at FIT

Cue Club, Notting Hill, 1966, Photo by: Charlie Phillips (from the V&A exhibition Black British Style).

FIT is currently hosting its annual fashion symposium. Organized by Valerie Steele cuncurrently with the Gothic: Dark Glamour exhibition, this year's symposium is dedicated to the topic of subcultural styles.

Among the speakers are Carol Tulloch, who completed extensive research on black British style and curated an exhibition on the topic at the V&A in 2004, and the anthropologist Ted Polhemus, known for his pioneering theories on subcultural styles. A special space seems to be occupied by Japanese style, with three speakers--Yuniya Kawamura, Hiroshi Narumi and Tiffany Godoy--discussing various aspects of Japanese subcultures and street styles.

Please visit the FIT site for a complete schedule.

Calder’s World

Alexander Calder, Jealous Husband Necklace, 1940

At the entrance of Alexander Calder’s jewelry exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “the Jealous Husband” Necklace. A seemingly witty reference to chastity belts, the piece sports spikes across the neck opening to stave away potential suitors. This necklace encapsulates the spirit of Calder’s jewelry, which appears witty and whimsical yet, at times, reads as constricting. Suggestions of boundedness and containment seem to transpire in some of the pieces—particularly a number of chocker-style necklaces. These are overlaid with Surrealist influences, as well as references to medieval and non-Western jewelry traditions.

Alexander Calder, Silver Bracelet, 1948

The majority of Calder’s jewelry pieces are reminiscent of his work with wire. Some, like a number of pieces on display a short walk away at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are abstract representation of animals through a continuous sculpted line. Other pieces make more subtle references to the rest of his oeuvre: some of the jewelry pieces are reminiscent of the ankle and arm bracelets worn by Josephine Baker in her Parisian performances, while the pointed wire structures Calder devised to represent Baker’s breasts resurface here in a bracelet. (It is interesting to note how Calder’s rendition of Baker’s breast is highly reminiscent of Jean Paul Gaultier’s conical bra, famously worn by another era’s pop star, Madonna, in the early 1990s. One is left to wonder whether Gaultier might have been directly influenced by Calder’s work. )

Alexander Calder’s “Josephine Baker IV"

Additionally, much of the jewelry entered the realms of wearables, as with a chain mail necklace, which in its size and shape is more akin to a see-through metal “waistcoat” than a necklace (and, once again, brings to mind later fashion designs: Paco Rabanne’s chain mail wearables from the 1960s). Also, of notice are a number of hats and tiaras, which show Calder’s interest in clothing and garments, in addition to jewelry. This interest is perhaps most evident in the circus exhibition at the Whitney, where one can admire the beautifully and painstakingly rendered miniaturized clothes the artist created for the circus’ performers. And, at least in one instance, the clothes take center stage as one of the performers is revealed to be wearing an innumerable numbers of jackets in a Russian doll-style disrobing act, which is part of Calder’s circus performance.

Francesca Granata

Martin Margiela Exhibition

A retrospective of Martin Margiela’s work just opened at The ModeMuseum (MoMu) in Antwerp on occasion of the 20-year anniversary of the Maison. Curated by MoMu creative director Kaat Debo in collaboration with Bob Verhelst and the Maison itself, the exhibition captures Margiela’s exacting aesthetic in its design and installation.

As is often the case with MoMu exhibitions, the strength lies in the fact that they go beyond the display of objects and incorporate installation, photography, video and film to fully convey a designer’s aesthetic. This multi-media approach makes the exhibition particularly current and engaging as fashion-as-image occupies an ever-increasing centrality in the world of fashion. (This fact was recently highlighted by Suzy Menkes’s article in The International Herald Tribune, about the proliferation of fashion films.)

The MoMu exhibition opens with a cardboard cutout representing the employees of the Maison, whose faces, like Margiela’s, remain blank and, as the exhibition text points out, thus remain incognito. It continues with a series of garments from various collections and a number of Margiela’s variation on his signature shoe: the Tabi Shoe (derived from the Japanese tabi socks). The garments and accessories in the first room are covered with a layer of silver and white paint. The abundance of silver is reminiscent of Warhol’s Factory, while the white paint—a staple of Margiela’s aesthetic—cracks alongside the garments creases and register signs of wear. Thus, in one of the first of a series of subversions, the whitewash usually employed as a way to erase aging becomes a reminder of the passage of time.

The white layer covering the garments returns in the exhibition space, which is white-washed with the exception of enlarged photographic prints of the exhibition interior superimposed on some of the walls. This superimposition is meant to remind one of the tromp-l-oeil effects that pervade Margiela’s stores, offices and garments. This technique is most evident in Margiela’s headquarters in rue Saint Maur in Paris, where photographs of their previous offices are superimposed on doors and walls to instill the “new” spaces with the history of the Maison. This complicated relation to time and history is also evident in his clothes which are often pre-aged and combine garments from different periods together with Margiela’s own past work.

Time is, in fact, one of the two main themes of Margiela’s work and it imbues the entire exhibition, but is perhaps most evident in the installation exploring Margiela’s Spring/Summer 1996 collection where he printed photographs of old clothes onto new ones. The photographs and thus the resulting prints had also been artificially aged, acquiring a sepia tone and the out-of-focus look of old black and white prints. This gave a an artificially created nostalgic, melancholic look to the new garments. The simultaneous exploration and denial of nostalgia is common perhaps to the exhibition as a whole, where enigmatic white spaces, muted colors and a lyrical aesthetic is undercut by witty subversions.

This is perhaps most evident in the collection and exhibition sections exploring the themes of the body. For instance, all white and black dress forms illustrating Margiela’s changing vocabulary become reminiscent of a frozen army in their stillness. On the other hand, enlarged collections and collections derived from doll clothes not only question standardized body size, but bring us back to a world of childhood play (the Barbie dolls) and fairy tales (the giants). A number of these clothes are in fact enlarged versions of Barbie’s clothes, which retained all the disproportion of the original. Thus, Margiela’s doll clothes appear doubly ironic, as they unveil the inherent “disproportions” of garments belonging to a model body—that of Barbie—metonymically calling into question the idealized body of the doll. Other collections which he produced at the turn of the millennium instead explore clownish proportions alongside the designer’s more common tropes of inside-out and seemingly unfinished garments.

Photo Ronald Stoops. Make-up Inge Grognard

At the end of the exhibition space there is a circular room containing fashion shows alongside fashion films and photographs, which the Maison produced throughout the year (a selection of which can also be bought at the Museum store). This is perhaps the section that most fully explicates the importance of collaboration to the Maison. The way the Margiela aesthetic has developed thanks to an array of photographers (Ronald Stoops, Anders Edström), designers (Bob Verhelst, who was also the exhibition designer), make-up artists (Inge Grognard) and countless others. Most interesting are perhaps the early videos of his work and fashion films, also because they are the least available. A short, grainy super-8 film looks much like an experimental film from the 1970s inspired by early silents and showing women wearing Margiela’s clothes while engaging in simple daily activities. Like many Margiela’s models throughout much of his career (with the exception of his most recent collections), they are often “regular” women—middle-age, young women with their children, or pregnant women. This short makes for a touching film, which encapsulates Margiela’s lyrical tone where a certain quietness and silence is cultivated, and where much remains unsaid or only lightly suggested—a rare strategy in the over-saturated world of image and fashion.

Francesca